Electric Vehicle charging station tax credits a victim of US Govt budget battles

The latest round of the U.S. Federal budget showdown was averted with the deal on the payroll tax cut, but there was collateral damage with dozens of tax credits that were not extended and are now expiring on Saturday, including three related to electric vehicles and several more related to biofuel production.

 Read full story at: http://www.torquenews.com/

T-Sport gets IRS certification

The IRS has just certified the T-Sport for the 10% plug-in electric vehicle tax credit. Now you can save on your energy expense and your taxes with one purchase!

Great News!

An exciting development in the world of electric vehicles this week. Govenor Jerry Brown has signed a bill allowing cities in Riverside County to allow LSVs on city streets with speed limits up to 45 mph. Check out the details in this article reprinted from PE.com.


10:16 PM PDT on Thursday, August 4, 2011
By JIM MILLER and DUG BEGLEY
Staff Writers

 SACRAMENTO -   Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Thursday that gives Riverside County and its cities the ability to allow smaller, slower electric vehicles on more roads.
The measure is the latest of several bills over the years that have carved out exceptions in parts of California to the statewide rule prohibiting neighborhood electric vehicles from roads where the speed limit is 35 mph or more.
Thursday's measure is by far the biggest in scope, making it possible that the electric vehicles -- sometimes referred to as "golf carts on steroids" -- will become much more common in the state's fourth-largest county.
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Stan Lim/The Press-Enterprise
 Paul Rodriguez with Urban Crossroads, demonstrates a street legal electric cart. The vehicles are sometimes referred to as “golf carts on steroids” Inland cities, notably Norco and Corona, include the neighborhood vehicles in city land-use decisions. Special lanes along some streets would allow the smaller, slower cars to travel alongside conventional automobiles.
 Palm Desert and Beaumont have also embraced the smaller vehicles with specific plans for allowing them on city streets and special paths.
 For now, local governments have the option to begin the necessary planning process and safety measures to allow the vehicles. Supporters of the bill say the vehicles are a convenient alternative to conventional cars and trucks and could help the region meet state targets for reducing emissions blamed for global warming.
 "I don't know if we'll see a lot of them," said Assemblyman Kevin Jeffries, R-Lake Elsinore, the bill's author. "With the mandates being pushed down by the state and federal government, the state really has an obligation to give the county and cities in Riverside County the flexibility to meet some of those standards."
The Western Riverside Council of Governments sponsored the legislation. The agency conducted a four-city study in 2010 that evaluated how the vehicles could fit into the region's road network.
Rick Bishop, the agency's executive director, said he thinks those four cities -- Corona, Norco, Riverside and Moreno Valley -- will act on the law, with more possibly to follow.
"It's basically signage and road-striping. That's a minimal capital expenditure," Bishop said. "I think once it starts and we start to see some penetration...I could see it expanding. At least that's the hope."
Current state law bans the vehicles from driving on roads where the speed limit is 35 mph or more. Under Jeffries' bill, the vehicles would still be banned on roads where the speed limit tops 45 mph.
The all-electric vehicles can seat two to four passengers and, in most cases, have a top speed of 25 miles mph.
 But sales to residents -- the vehicles start at $7,000 and with extras cost as much as $20,000 -- have been hard to come by. The Department of Motor Vehicles reports that there are 104,000 electric vehicles in the state, and that number includes freeway-worthy passenger cars. That is a fraction of the 32 million registered vehicles statewide.
Reach Jim Miller at 916-445-9973 or jmiller@PE.com

Suck, squeeze, bang, bust: the death of internal combustion

Reprinted from: Engadget

 

By Tim Stevens posted Feb 3rd 2011 12:28PM

Editorial

I don't smoke and I never have. I can't say as I've felt the temptation to ever try that particular vice, especially given the cost these days. 50 years ago my avoiding that lifestyle choice would have put me in the minority, and if I'd dared asked a smoker to step outside or made any implications about what their habit was doing to my lungs... well, that wouldn't have gone over well.

Today, of course, such questions and expectations are the norm, with legislation forcing smokers into the cold and science showing that what comes out of their mouths isn't great for passers by. But why am I talking about cigarette smoking on a gadget blog? In a few decades this is what it's going to be like to drive a car with internal combustion, a life full of exorbitant taxes, constant inconveniences, and state-sponsored attempts at inducing shame among those who would dare putter around with an engine that casts off 70 percent (or more) of its energy as waste.

The internal combustion engine hasn't become such a hugely popular means of propulsion for particularly complex reasons. At the dawn of the automobile there were many different ways of powering a car, from steam to gunpowder to, yes, electric cars with limited range. Gasoline didn't win out because there were pump stations on every corner (there weren't) or because it was scientifically created to be the perfect fuel (it wasn't). It won because it was cheap -- nobody wanted it.

When Siegfried Marcus was (arguably) the first to put a four-stroke internal combustion engine in a car in 1875, paving the way for the modern automobile, gasoline was a largely unwanted byproduct of oil refining. Heavy greases, kerosene, and other petroleum products were pulled out of oil and all of them had a use -- except for petrol. Nobody really knew what to do with the highly flammable, bad-smelling stuff. So, it was burned off or stuck in holding tanks, the sort that put a spring in the step of Trashcan Man.

Unfortunately we don't have figures for what gasoline cost per gallon back in the 19th century. The earliest reliable data we could find comes courtesy of the Department of Energy, starting in 1919 with a price of $.25 per gallon -- $2.84 in modern dollars. Over the next decades, as the gasoline car took over and pushed everything else out of the way, that price would actually drop to a low of $.17 per gallon in 1931. It would take another 25 years before a gallon of gas would get over $.30. Of course, gas prices have more than doubled in the past seven years.

Adjusting for inflation, gasoline got only cheaper through the entire twentieth century -- except for a big blip during the Fuel Crisis. This is what helped the gasoline-powered car to take over, pushing all the other options into tiny niches that they've yet to escape from. In those ensuing years of dominance the internal combustion engine, the basic mechanism needed to turn the chemical energy of gasoline into something mechanical, has been heavily refined and improved.

Each time you put 10 gallons of gas in your car only three of those are actually used to move you forward.

But it still does a terrible job. An average internal combustion engine is less than 30 percent efficient. That means each time you put 10 gallons of gas in your car only three of those are actually used to move you forward and keep your stereo grooving. The other seven gallons are used to warm up your coolant, grind gears and bearings against each other, or are simply shot out the muffler as waste heat. Throw on a hybrid system to capture energy under braking, a heat exchanger to soak up the excess temperature, and a turbocharger to grab the noise and gaseous fury that comes out the back and you can help. But, you're never going to get close to 100 percent efficient. Even 50 seems like a long shot.

Electric motors for cars, meanwhile, score efficiencies in the low 90 percent range, the bigger and more powerful the motor the greater the efficiency becomes. Now that certainly doesn't mean EVs are 90-odd percent efficient overall, but they are already better than internal combustion. Look at a current vehicle like the Honda FCX Clarity, an electric car running on a hydrogen fuel cell. It can travel 60 miles per kilogram of hydrogen and, since the energy in one Kg of hydrogen is about the same as that in a gallon of gasoline, you get an equivalent rating of 61mpg. A Honda Accord EX, which weighs about the same, scores 24mpg. A Toyota Camry Hybrid is rated at 31mpg.

Diesel comes closest, with Honda offering a 40mpg diesel Accord in Europe, but that still falls short. And remember, this is still early days of electric tech. Yes, we have a way to go before we can, nationwide, consider the entire process of power generation, delivery, and storage to be that efficient. And, yes, until we get more renewable energy sources online the mere generation of hydrogen is a losing proposition. But the alternative isn't exactly a rosy picture -- especially if you consider the cost of throwing oil in a boat and toting it across the ocean.

In the coming years the odds are only going to get stacked further against the 'ol suck squeeze bang blow routine. Whether the electrons come from hydrogen sifted through a fuel cell or straight out of a battery, electric cars are the future. They're novelties now, but soon they'll be practical and, at that point, people will have to make a decision: go electric or stick with the ICE?

Cars with "engines" will become less practical and more of a lifestyle decision.

At first it won't be an easy choice, but as gas prices keep climbing and battery technology/hydrogen availability improve, cars with "engines" will become less and less practical and more and more of a lifestyle decision. The corner 24 hour store will stop having eight pumps offering gasoline and go down to four, then to two, then just one. It'll be situated 'round the back and you'll have to go inside and ask the cashier to turn on for you. Eventually that'll be gone too; finding go juice will start to become a challenge.

Public service announcements will decry the awful impacts of carbon monoxide on our health, talk about the other noxious things spewing out of tailpipes, and try to label those driving cars with this tech as Bad People. Little towns surrounded by pesticide-free fields and peppered with organic coffee shops will ban cars powered by internal combustion, forcing those who own them to make big detours or just go back home.

By then the government will have put taxes high enough on the sale of gasoline that driving such a car will be a luxury enjoyed only by those who can pay out the ear to have the sonorous tones of a well (or poorly) tuned engine drone back in.

I don't say this out of hatred for the internal combustion engine. I love the breathy rush of my Toyota MR-2, its air intake just behind my head. The lumpy idle of my Subaru WRX's flat-four makes me grin and my Triumph's inline triple gives me tingles in all sorts of good places as it approaches redline. I take my earplugs out at the start of every F1, MotoGP, ALMS and other race I attend so that I can better experience it -- and then hastily stuff them back in before I've done too much damage.

But the days for that experience are numbered. The internal combustion engine will not be the practical, economical choice for everyone forever -- not even for long -- and when we hit that threshold we can't all spend our days lamenting what's lost or searching for ever-funkier alternative fuels. Besides, have you ever heard the scream of an electric-powered car or bike accelerating hard? It sounds pretty good. It sounds like the future.

Update: For those getting hung up on the relative efficiency bit, I encourage you to view this research presentation (PDF) which compared well-to-wheel efficiencies of various types of powertrain, including losses for everything from transporting oil to generating the electricity from coal. It concludes that current fuel cell vehicles are on-par with diesel hybrid vehicles, but that those in the future will be more efficient, and current battery-powered EVs are more efficient still.

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A Bailout ... for Golf Cars?

Bill Morgan has been in business for a dozen years, but he's never seen demand like this: Customers are flocking to his showroom to purchase electric, street-legal golf cars -- golf carts that can be driven on public roadways as well as golf courses.

"The economy is not good for golf right now," Morgan, the owner of Action Golf Cars in Ormond Beach, Fla., said. But the golf cars are "selling so fast, it's amazing."

It's all thanks, he said, to the federal government. The bailout bill that last year helped keep the U.S. banking system afloat also contained lesser-known provisions to benefit other industries, including the electric car business.

Under the Bush administration's Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, buying a plug-in electric motor vehicle can make a consumer eligible for a tax credit of at least $2,500 plus additional cash depending on a car's battery

In April, the Internal Revenue Service confirmed that "neighborhood electric vehicles" or NEVs -- a common term for electric-powered golf cars and other low-speed vehicles allowed on public roadways -- bought in 2009 qualified for the tax credit. (The IRS indicated that traditional golf carts used mainly on golf courses -- as opposed to street-legal vehicles -- aren't eligible for the credit. It said in its April statement that "vehicles manufactured primarily for off-road use, such as for use on a golf course, do not qualify.")

Morgan said the battery capacity on 12 cars he sells qualifies them for tax credits of $5,335 each.

In recent months, he and golf car dealers across the country have been advertising the tax credit as an incentive to get buyers in the door -- and it's working, they say.

Unlike traditional golf carts, golf cars that are street-legal must include safety features such as headlights, seat belts, parking brakes and driver's side mirrors, according to federal mandates. They are allowed to reach maximum speeds of 25 miles per hour and individual states decide which roadways the cars may travel on.

Morgan said he's sold 40 cars priced between $6,495 and $10,600 in the last six weeks -- more than $260,000 in sales, which he said is a record for his company. Morgan's supplier, South Carolina-based JH Global Services, Inc., told ABCNews.com that it's seen spikes in sales too.

"A month of sales now is almost equal to a couple of quarters in the past," JH Global CEO Jane Zhang said.